Outdoors: For new hikers, Adirondack high peak means pain, gain

Updated 6:03 am, Friday, August 28, 2015

Gillian Scott with rookie hiker Andrea on the slide on Macomb Mountain in the Adirondack High Peaks. (Herb Terns / Times Union)

Gillian Scott with rookie hiker Andrea on the slide on Macomb Mountain in the Adirondack High Peaks. (Herb Terns / Times Union)

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Herb Terns helps a rookie hiker navigate the slide on Macomb Mountain in the Adirondack High Peaks. (Gillian Scott / Special to the Times Union)

Herb Terns helps a rookie hiker navigate the slide on Macomb Mountain in the Adirondack High Peaks. (Gillian Scott / Special to the Times Union)

Outdoors: For new hikers, Adirondack high peak means pain, gain

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Andrea was not a happy camper.

A third of the way up the slide on Macomb, one of the Adirondack peaks with a summit higher than 4,000 feet, my nephew's girlfriend was frozen in place. She wasn't looking at the lovely view spread out before us — Elk Lake in the distance, glittering under a summer sky crowded with fluffy white clouds, and mountains all around. Instead, she was staring at the rubble in front of her, and I was afraid she might cry.

When we take friends and family into the woods with us, our goal is not tears. Like bringing someone to see a favorite band or to eat at a favorite restaurant, taking people hiking is a chance for us to share something we love. We hope they enjoy it, hope they find some of the same rewards that we do during our outdoor adventures. We'll point out views, flowers, butterflies, frogs, moss, trees — whatever we think might interest them — and if we're lucky, they like it as much as we do.

The problem is that once you step away from local parks and preserves, hiking often involves a little suffering. Bugs bite, muscles ache and knees throb. We try to head off blisters, thirst and hunger, but there's not much we can do about general sweatiness, grime and fatigue.

During a recent mini family reunion in the Adirondacks, my husband, Herb, and I led two trips into the woods. On our first outing, we took my brother, niece, nephew and Andrea up Sunrise Mountain, which we remembered as offering fabulous views. What we forgot was how tough the three-mile climb to the summit could be. My brother suffered quietly, sometimes bending over with his hands on his knees to catch his breath, looking grim. My 15-year-old niece suffered a little less quietly, suggesting several times that she was dying. Both had hiked with us before, but it had been a long time since either had been on a trail.

We plied our crew with encouragement, ample rest breaks and bug spray. Despite some aching legs, everyone persevered and no one died. We all made it to the summit, where everyone seemed just about as excited by the view as they had been when discovering they had cell service three-quarters of the way up the mountain.

Two days later, Herb and I set out with just my nephew, Adam, and Andrea, both 19, to climb Macomb. They'd tackled Sunrise with little difficulty, and Adam was eager to add another High Peak to the list he'd started as a child before moving out of state. I hadn't planned to hike a High Peak, but I agreed to go along in case Andrea, a relatively new hiker, wanted to turn around.

Faced with her struggles on the slide, though, I found I didn't want her to quit. At least, not because she was scared and shaky. If she was tired or bored, I would have urged her to go back — and would have gone back with her, happily. But fear? I know too well how paralyzing fear can be, how we can regret the things it keeps us from attempting. I barely knew this young woman, but I wanted her to know she could do this. And if she was going on, so was I.

The slide, strewn with loose dirt and rocks in varying sizes, was tricky, but it wasn't really dangerous. I told Andrea we could turn around, but also encouraged her to keep going. Tough girl that she is, she pushed through her fear and picked her way through the slippery scree with minimal aid.

More troubling was my exuberant nephew, whose knee started to hurt as we descended from the summit. He'd been in a car accident about a month earlier, and now the previously sore joint was escalating to something more painful. We plied him with anti-inflammatories and offered trekking poles, but he limped along for several miles, and the next morning, he couldn't put weight on his leg. He was later diagnosed with torn cartilage.

I gave the family a few weeks to recover from their outings with us, then asked if the aches and pains had been worthwhile. Did they have fun in spite of the suffering? Would they hike with us again? The answers — yes and yes — were gratifying. We may be less ambitious with our plans next time, but we'll keep trying to add to our hiking family.